Maynard High students complete senior project in Guatemala

After spending four days teaching dental hygiene at an elementary school in Guatemala, life will never quite be the same for two Maynard High School seniors.

On March 26, Janel Carr and Catherine “Katie” Campbell traveled to Antigua, Guatemala, with four other students and three chaperones. From there, they made the 20-minute bus ride each day to Jardin de Amor school in Santa Maria de Jesus, where they spent four days teaching first-graders how to properly care for their teeth, as part of their senior project class. They returned on April 3.

Jardín de Amor, a small primary school, was started on June 15, 2005. There are 95 children that attend the school, receiving education and food supplements. Their parents also receive classes in hygiene, health care and cleanliness.

Prior to the trip, Janel and Katie collected donations of toothpaste, toothbrushes and dental floss to give to the children. Then, with the help of coloring pages and a dog puppet that came with his own toothbrush, and working from prepared lesson plans, they taught the children how to brush and floss their own teeth.

Many of the children at the school don’t have their own toothbrushes at home, they said, and most had never used floss during their young lives.

While much of their time was spent teaching and helping out at the school, Katie and Janel also had time to explore the countryside. During one of those trips, they visited the home of one of the students, to discover that the parents and five children lived in a one-room house with dirt floors, typical of many of the students at the school. Despite the fact that most of the children come from poor families, they said, they are happy and loving.

“The kids were just so, so happy and they had nothing,” said Janel. “Seeing them be so happy made me realize we don’t have it so bad. We are so privileged and we don’t realize it. And it makes me feel lucky.”

Katie, too, is surprised at how resilient the children are. She recalled a moment when one child pushed another in the playground, and how the child who was pushed simply got up and brushed himself off and the teachers didn’t intervene. In Maynard, she said, two or three teachers would step in, someone would be crying and someone would be sent to the principal’s office.

“They would get up and nothing would be wrong,” she said. “Life moves on.”

She recalled, too, children playing on a pile of trash and having a great time.

“It’s a very different environment than it is here,” Katie said. “And we are just so privileged and it’s hard to remember that all the time.”

They both look forward to a time when they will be able to return to the school to volunteer.

But back at Maynard High there is still work to do. Janel is completing an internship in a local law office to complete her senior project class. Katie is working on a second paper. They are both preparing for their project presentations in May.

Three weeks after they returned to the U.S. the memory of their trip remains with them and they hope the children will remember, too.

“Hopefully [the dental hygiene lessons] created a habit in them that they should be brushing their teeth every day,” said Janel.

“I really hope that they remember this and I feel like they will,” said Katie. “But they also changed our lives a lot and I want to do more stuff like this. I would love to have a chance to go back to the school and see if any of the kids remember us.”

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